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I have been a friand fan since I was given this chocolate cookbook pretty young and made this one Chocolate Raspberry Friand recipe whenever I had the chance. Friands are these dense, egg-white laden, butter-filled cakes that have almond meal in on the mix and simply taste outrageously good. Considering the ingredients of the traditional variety, they're a little hard to veganize, and these took me a couple of (kinda expensive) tries to get right. They need to tick a bunch of boxes, the dense box, the moist box, the easy to extract from the tin box, let alone the flavor box. I'm stocked with the result and know you will be too honeybunches - if you need to impress someone who's coming round, shove one of these and a fork in their hand and wait for them to go gooey with delight!!

Makes 10-12 Friands

Ingredients

1 cup plain flour

1 cup almond meal (also known as almond flour)

1/4 cup cacao powder

1 tsp baking powder

pinch of salt

3/4 cup grapeseed oil (or coconut oil)

1/2 cup maple syrup

1 tsp vanilla

1/2 cup plant milk (rice, soy, almond etc.)

1/4 cup coconut sugar

frozen raspberries (or fresh but - you know... wow$a$!)

chopped, or flaked almonds

Method

Preheat your oven to 160C, and on a slow setting (if your oven has it, otherwise fan-forced is fine too).

In a large bowl, combine the first five ingredients down to and including the salt through a fine sieve. If there's a couple of clumps of almond meal left in the sieve, just add that to the bowl it's fine.

In another bowl, combine the oil, maple, vanilla, plant milk and coconut sugar with a whisk until combined.

Add the wet ingredients to the dry, whisking until smooth.

Butter and flour a 12 hole muffin tin (or friand tin if you have it), divide the mixture amongst the holes - ensuring they are at least 1cm below the rim of the each hole.

Smoosh in a couple of raspberries into each friand, as well as some flaked/chopped almonds. Bake in the pre-heated oven for 30 minutes (be careful not to over cook them as a dry friand is a very unhappy little thing), letting cool in the tin slightly before turning out and serving.